Baby Octopus
by Aveza
Summary: [Daikari One-Shot, AU] A college drop-out turned amateur chef, a primary schoolteacher with a penchant for adventurous cuisine, and a noodle cart. Fill in the blanks.


**A/N: So, confession: I am a Takari person. Really, I am. But after watching the Adventure 02 epilogue, I can't get over the fact that Daisuke/Davis runs a famous noodle cart business. It's comical but fitting, in my opinion. And I always have a soft spot for the goggle boys who don't get the girl, so I thought I'd give this pairing a chance. I enjoyed writing this, and I can only hope that you enjoy reading it as well. :)**

**(Title is COMPLETELY arbitrary because I have no FREAKING clue what to call this damn thing!) **

xXx

_- Baby Octopus - _

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**S**he had started coming around the beginning of June. He knew because the weather around that time had become unreliable. Spring rain arrived randomly and in spurts. Sometimes heavy and trapping. Other times, misty and annoying, causing one to debate the helpfulness of an umbrella.

Five years prior, he wouldn't have even noticed such changes as the seasons transpired. He'd have braved the storms without a jacket, gotten soaked to the bone, and then would have rewarded himself for his foolishness with a hot shower when he got home.

But, nowadays, rain was an enemy. It limited the number of passersby on the busy city sidewalks, kept him leaning against his open vending window, resting his cheek on a fist as potential customers avoided eye contact as well as a few minutes to stop, breathe, and eat a heartwarming meal.

She hadn't been one of them.

On one such dreary, drenching afternoon, he was startled out of his idle reverie. His dark eyes, which had gone glazed staring at the shimmering sheets of rain, beheld before him the dome of a pastel pink umbrella and the bright face shielded beneath it, beaming at him as fluorescently as the absent sun.

"Are you open?" she asked.

It took a while for him to remember that he was the owner of a noodle cart, and that the petite woman looking at him was a much needed customer.

"Uh, yes." He glimpsed at her, taking in the gentleness of her soft brown eyes. "Sorry," he added. "Business has been slow."

"No worries," she said.

"So… What'll it be?"

"What would you recommend?"

The question caught him off guard. Typically, patrons would hurriedly grumble a menu item and then wait the agonizing five minutes it took to have it prepared, desiring that their time, evidently, be spent somewhere else. But she continued to stand in the ceaseless pitter-patter, calm and still.

He thought a moment.

"Well, something that's not on the menu, first of all," he said.

"Oh?" She chuckled lightly behind an ivory hand.

"Yeah. This stuff?" He gestured at his list of dishes. "Kid's stuff. Boring. But it's what people like, so I serve it."

"What would you serve, then, if you didn't have to cater to the general public?"

There was a slight sing-songy air to her voice, one that seemed to match his sarcasm as he referred to his own labors.

He smiled.

"I'll show you."

She became a regular afterwards—regardless of weather. Every visit she asked him the same question, "What would you recommend?" and every time, he'd concoct some new noodle dish for her adventurous taste buds, usually on the spot. She wasn't a fan of every meal, and she'd let him know that. "Too much salt," she'd say, or, "I think it could have done without the baby octopus," to which he'd reply with an embarrassed grin and a scratch of his head while she laughed and told him it was all right even though, inside, he felt like his flesh was fizzing into something not unlike chicken broth.

Some days, however, she'd bring guests, and he'd be juggling orders for a multitude of five to eight people while they all watched him with anticipation through his cart window. Occasionally, he'd glance at her to see if she was observing him cook as well, and every time—he didn't know _why_—they always met eyes, and she'd always send him a slight, but assuring smile, no matter how occupied or stressed he was.

Then, after some month of having served her, she no longer alternated between coming alone and coming with guests. She began to approach his noodle cart accompanied by one other person—a young man—blond, good-looking, with a notebook always tucked under his arm and a pen always wedged behind his ear.

He didn't know how to react the first time he saw them together. The only thing that could come out of his mouth was:

"Should I get you the couple's special?"

She had laughed then, teeth covered by her slender flingers, blush tinting her cheeks. By her reaction alone, he had hoped that she would deny any form of dalliance with the blond and say, simply, that they were only good friends. His fantasy was dashed—not by her, but by her companion.

"Well, if you really do have one," said the blond, putting an arm around her slender shoulders, "we'll take it."

He didn't know why, but for the first time since he dropped out of graduate school and took up the crazy idea of owning and operating a traveling noodle cart, he hated his job. The meal he prepared for them was far from his best. The sauce was acrid, the pasta overcooked, the garnishes clumpy. The blond ate it all with a raise of his eyebrows, remarking on the palatable flavor, wiping his chin with the back of his hand. It was a novice's opinion, the compliment of a newborn in the culinary arts, the praise of a person with antimony for taste buds.

When he looked at her to check her reaction, she gave none. She ate quietly, nodding her head only to the words said by her blond beau. For the first time since she had come to his food cart, she didn't finish her meal.

He closed his stand earlier that day, and he walked to his apartment in the balmy summer heat, hands balled into fists and jammed into his pockets. Along the way, he passed countless numbers of couples strolling the streets at sundown, their imperfect symmetry silhouetted in the receding shadow of day. He wondered why the summer months were the time of year to hook up. It was almost as bad as Valentine's Day. Or maybe he was just hypersensitive to seeing people joined at the hip or wrist because his own isolation accentuated the lack of someone else to hold onto when he was falling apart.

The more he thought about it, the more he came to accept that he was being stupid—an acknowledgement that he was quite used to making. After all, he gave up his education, destroyed his parents' hopes of him becoming a career man, some dapper gentleman who went to work in a white collar uniform—lawyer, doctor, business tycoon—and secured a wife by flirting with the women under his supervision. He abandoned it all, truly inherited the title of "prodigal son," to be a wayfaring, amateur chef. He had nothing to offer her. Nothing, he believed, that would ever make her see him as more than just the quirky young man who made her lunch every day, rain or shine.

It went without saying that every day after, he dreaded the hour she came. The blond was always with her, her arm looped through the crook of his. He still carried the same notebook and pen, always.

He tried to be better about cooking them appetizing meals—for her sake, if not for anyone else's. Even if she no longer came to him solo, she still asked him the same question: "What would you recommend?"

Except, this time, and every time afterwards, he was cooking for two.

Sometimes (because he couldn't help the urge), he eavesdropped on the couple's conversations while they ate.

"How's that story of yours coming along?" she'd ask.

"All right. It's missing something, though. Not sure what. I might have to rent a cabin out in the woods for a while to clear my head of all this… _urban_ garbage."

"Garbage?" she'd echo.

"Life is busy here," he'd explain. "Distracting. I can't think straight sometimes. Every person becomes a nuisance, his or her thoughts interfering with my own as I brainstorm, blocking my way out of this unproductive stint."

"Maybe I could go with you," she'd suggest. "I think I can ask for a week off from the school."

"I'm not sure that's a good idea…" He'd smile and cup her chin under his thumb and forefinger. "You're distracting, too. Probably the most."

On other occasions, the couple wouldn't talk at all while they lifted coils of noodles out of the bowls they held in their hands. Her brown eyes would be kept trained on the cement floor, his blue ones squinting at some mysterious spot in the distance. On yet others, she'd nibble on her food in silence, head bowed, while his went cold sitting on the counter of the noodle cart, his hands too busy scribbling away in the notebook he kept on his person as if it were his own flesh and bone.

For the duration of the summer, they fluctuated between such meetings, until he began to notice that they would approach the noodle cart no longer walking hand-in-hand. They would abandon speech altogether while they ate. Eye contact, too. One afternoon, she left the blond early, dumping her half-finished meal into a trash can and stomping off while her beau continued to stare out into space, the end of his pen tapping against his silent, motionless lips, his noodles grey and cold.

The arrival of fall brought with it another unpredictable weather season. Rain became a frequent and, oft times, unanticipated, visitor as the warmth of summer faded into the blustering chill of autumn. This time, however, the rain, with the help of the cold, brought endless streams of customers to his doorstep. The people wanted—craved—warmth, embers of it that would spread throughout their frigid bodies from the inside out. And he obliged them, taking their demands with eagerness, relishing the enthusiasm of hands that shoved money through his cart window, and more so the hands that snatched the hot bowls of noodles from his grasp.

But he hadn't gotten so caught up in his temporary success to realize that she had stopped coming at her appointed hour. The weather had nothing to do with her absence. She was gone on days that were sunny, and also on days that were wet and miserable. Her bright face, her gentle brown eyes, her milk-white hands—every part of her, vanished.

He tried not to let her absence get to him. Every reason he could think of that was a plausible excuse was considered with care. Perhaps she had been transferred to another school. Maybe she married the blond and relocated to that cabin in the woods. Maybe she decided to go on a diet that didn't involve noodles, changed her lifestyle to one that didn't subsist on the food he happily made for her, or on him, for that matter.

One night, as he closed up shop, he spent too many minutes thinking about her and why her lack of presence impacted him so strongly. She was just a customer. Customers came and went, like the seasons. His own means of living was a structure built for capriciousness. It was a food cart, made for travel, designed to take him to places as exotic as the combinations he made up for his long-lost regular.

With a sigh, he shut the vending window and exited the cart, getting hit in the face with a cool wind as soon as he left the comfort of his pitiful little restaurant on wheels.

His stare was hinged to the ground, but his eyebrows furrowed as he noticed a difference in the shadows cast by the streetlamp onto the sidewalk. He turned, abruptly, eyes widening when he saw her standing a few yards away from him, leaning against the lamppost, petite body silhouetted under the glare of the light.

"I'm guessing you're closed?" she said timidly, improving her posture as he walked, slowly, towards her.

"Uh, yeah," he said. He scratched his head. "I wish I knew you were hiding over here. I would have stayed open another fifteen minutes for you."

He couldn't see if she was smiling. The shadows across her face made it too difficult to tell.

"I was…" He sucked in a breath, hand still on his head, wondering if he should keep talking. "I was wondering where you went," he admitted, at last. She giggled. He breathed easier.

"I'm sorry," she said, when her laughter had diminished. She stepped forward, coming far enough out of the light so that he could see her clearly. "There's been… _a lot_ going on in my life."

"Urban garbage?" he posed, smirking faintly.

She stifled her chuckles with a hand. How he missed that gesture.

"Exactly."

Silence followed, one so intense that he thought he could feel their heartbeats throbbing in the space and quiet that divided them. He approached.

"Hey, so if you want something to eat, I could..." He shrugged. "…open the cart again. Start up the stove. We could eat inside. What'll it be?"

Her laughter couldn't be contained. It bubbled out, and she reached out to him, touching him gently on the back of his hand. His heart stopped.

"What would you recommend?" she asked.

Her brown eyes gazed up at him, sparkling even in the darkness, smiling warmly despite the cold. Somehow, his fingers found a way around her hand, assessing, by the temperature of her skin, the feathery weight of her bones, what would fulfill her, give her substance to satisfy whatever emptiness she might have felt or did feel. But for some odd reason he couldn't think of a new combination of ingredients to satisfy her curiosity. His resources had run dry, his imagination at an all time low.

And so he did the only thing he could do.

"I'll show you," he said.

And he took her bright face in his hands and kissed her.


End file.
